conversations in ten questions 66: Sofia Dias & Vitor Roriz

© Joana Linda

What is the essence of performance in your opinion?

First of all we need to say that we don’t have any special skill to answer questions that are simultaneously general and profound. And even less in such a short time. Most of our answers to these questions are just commonplace. Where we think we may have something to say (slightly different from everyone else) is in our performative work. And even there we don’t know. Having said that, we can start… Before we used to say that our mission was to act, not necessarily to change or maintain a reality, but to reveal it in the sense of finding “images” for certain sensations, emotions or ideas for which they had not yet been found. You know when you’re reading a text or a poem and you say “oh, it was exactly what I was feeling but I hadn't found the words yet”. Well, in our work we are just trying to find forms for things we feel but for each we still don’t have the words or the gestures or the images. We just finished saying this and it feels so commonplace. It’s very hard not to use cliches. Poetry deals wonderfully with this problem in written language. Moving away from cliches is a necessary quest for what we could define as authenticity. Maybe that’s what we are looking for in our performances and what moves us when watching performances from other artists. A bit naive and romantic, isn’t it? So, just to play the game and answer your question with a simple and bold idea: for us the essence of performance is… authenticity. But “essence” is such an uncomfortable word ‘cause we are essentially made of so many superficialities. Anyway let's follow to the next question.

Do you believe in the transformative power of art? How?

If we didn’t believe in the “transformative power of art” we wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing. First of all we have been transformed and we continue being transformed by art. We are not talking about our performative work, we’re talking about the art that we had the privilege of being submerged in all these years. We would be completely different people if we didn't have access to it. Art changes our minds, it is a powerful and dangerous tool because it has the ability to express what cannot be expressed or has not yet been expressed. It connects us with the unknown and the mysterious part of our existence. It’s a reflection of our dreams and of who we are - and sometimes our reflection it’s unbearable. It challenges conventions but it can also be used to maintain them. It’s such a powerful tool that all political systems try to control it. Capitalism seeks to subject it to the rules of the market. Authoritarian systems try to reduce it to folklore or use it as propaganda. You see, we were talking about cliches in the first question, and in the beginning of the answer to this second question we start with such a cliché: we wouldn’t be doing what we are doing if it weren't for the transformative power of art. Well, maybe the reasons for what we do are much more prosaic and less heroic. 

When you are working on a piece, what sources inspire you? Do dreams play a role in your pieces? 

What inspires us… what are the things that open up cracks in banality through which we can see something slightly different? What makes us continue doing what we do? Believing in what we do? What allows us to continue breathing in a world full of despair and… (all the other cliches with which we can define our time). Like many other people, the source of inspiration that allows us to live without getting mad is the same that influences and drives our work. And that is again Art and other artists. But we know we should be more specific. Because we've been working together for a while, every piece it’s like a continuation or an attempt to cut with a previous piece. At the beginning of each creative process we talk exactly about what is to continue, what is to stop, what is to reinvent and what haven’t we done until now that we want to do. Parallel to this autophagic dialogue around our work, we also try to understand what needs to be said at this moment in the world. It's a very wide question. We may arrive at simple answers like: the world needs more abstraction, subjectivity, empathy, etc. At the same time, we gather a bunch of references or inspirations ranging from a movie scene, a painting, the way a person talks or walks, a philosophical text or an article of pseudo-psychology, a constellation of elements that helps out building the mental map of the piece. So we build up this network of inspirations and then we go to the studio and after a while we just forget everything. We just improvise based on the pleasure of being together, and then we start finding performative material, from which derives other material, and from which we remember other references and inspirations that we haven’t thought of previously. During the process we try to keep a tacit dialogue with other works of art in order to feel part of a family or community that is somehow fighting for some mystery. Fighting as if we were just lying down, dreaming. Dreaming is essential (metaphorically we would say). But practically it also plays a role in our processes. Since a long time we have been interested in the way we can escape our conscious mind. Dreaming is a parenthesis of the “I”. And daydreaming could be a state of presence or a performative state. When you are in the immersive psychosomatic state known as creative flow you are in a kind of dreamy state that allows many different and unexpected connections to emerge. That is also why we love working together. When we are improvising and we both arrive in that flow state, we feel that what we are doing doesn’t belong to any of us but it’s emerging between us. When this happens, all the material we collected before as sources of inspiration start to combine in unexpected ways and things which were peripheral become central and what was central becomes periphery.

When do you decide to give a title to a piece you are working on if it already does not have one? 

 Finding a title it’s not so easy for us. Sometimes we arrive at a title before the process starts and it works as a kind of a leitmotif or a motto that condenses some of the ideas for the performance. Other times we find the title during the process and it may arrive as obvious for what we are doing. The best moment to give a title to a piece would be after its first or second public presentation. We only realize what a piece is when we share it with the audience. A title is like the first key you give to the audience to connect with the performance. A lot of people just read the synopsis after the show because they don’t want to be influenced by it, but for sure they will read the title before taking contact with the piece. So, we try to find titles that are simultaneously open to allow different perspectives on the piece and specific enough so it is not just anything. Some of our pieces have titles we are not very comfortable with and if we could we would change it everytime we would perform the piece. Actually that would be a nice concept for a project. Imagine we would change a title according to the places and contexts we are performing or change it according to what we feel about the piece in that moment. What would be the title for NEVER ODD OR EVEN in Istanbul? It would also be interesting to know what title would the audience give to our piece after watching it?

Are there any artists or people whom you think influenced your art most? And if there is such an artist or person, who?

We cannot say that! There are secrets that should be kept hidden. Those that influence us are creatures of the night and if they come to light they risk disappearing as if they had never existed. But well… there are a lot of artists and people that influence us, that change the way we think, that cause strong inflections in our work. We could name some of them as an homage and recognition of their influence but we feel the name dropping is always unfair because we would need to spend some time explaining why and how they influenced us. And we would end up talking about the obvious ones or those that are more easy to identify. In fact, sometimes we just realize how strongly we’ve been influenced by an artist or a person after a long time. The way “influences” operate are not linear or consequent. Curiously, when we make an archeology of what has really influenced us we find a lot of childhood references. On the other hand, we could just write a list of names to put everyone at the same level knowing that we will for sure forget someone (possibly those that are more important), so here goes: Beckett, Cassavetes, Rimbaud, Stuart, Herzog, Kiarostami, Jandek, Bessa-Luís, Saramago, Morizot, Sloterdijk, Klossowski, Rodrigues, Graham, Kelly, Myasaki, Anderson, Smith, Etchells, Burrows, Sebald, Crary, maybe it’s enough… it just seems strange to do this.

When you consider the current state of the world in every sense, what is the most important and urgent issue for you as an artist?

The current state of the world… oh… Well, in the last few years we have been confronted with so many radical changes in our world. The two of us are in a privileged periphery of Europe and most of the time we’re watching comfortably from our couches the different “states” the world goes through. We try to engage ourselves actively in some of those changes but we are full of contradictions, aren’t we? In the last few years we have been occupied with the concept of bridging the divide. Especially because of the growing polarized society we live in. We need to find ways to continue talking with those that are in the antipodes of our political, philosophical, ideological and even aesthetical convictions. Finding ways to reduce the objectification and dehumanization of the “other”. This is either a social and aesthetical endeavor. Art expands when two completely different things are connected and put in dialogue. It’s a question of survival. Our mind expands when we learn new things, different things, unfamiliar things.

As artists living in countries at opposite ends of Europe, how did you find and meet each other for a piece together? How were the logistics resolved during the creation process?

Isn’t that great? Artists living, as you say, in countries at opposite ends of Europe, from two completely different cultures, using their differences and communalities to create a piece. Of course the logistics weren’t obvious and we had to find ways to overcome the geographical distance and the fact that we couldn’t make a process of work based on our physical presence. For example, one of those strategies was a series of creative responses we made to each other. One of us would make a short video and send it to another that would write a text based on the video and then send it to another person that would use it as inspiration to compose a music and send it to a different person that would make a sequence of gestures with the music, and so on. But there were other ways. If there’s a strong desire or need to create, the apparent difficult conditions just become a creative motivation to do things differently. 

You and the Sızanlı-Kaplan couple have been known as dancer-choreographers who have worked almost exclusively with their own partners for more than a decade. How was the process of making a collaboration with another dancer-choreographer couple after all this time? 

 Because we have been working in a collaborative way for such a long time, the four of us share a strong belief in collaboration as the art of negotiation, of finding a way to live together. It’s not easy to collaborate. It’s not easy to live with people different from you. Sometimes you have to fight for what you think is really important and other times you have to make concessions without feeling you are losing yourself, and sometimes you just need to re-imagine what you think you are. We are very happy with the piece we’ve made, because despite the distance, the aesthetic and methodological differences we were able to find communalities, to transform our conflicts into creative material that could be used in the piece. And this piece is really a product of a poetic negotiation. Everyone should try to engage in some kind of a collaborative process. We learn so much to deal with our egos and to empathize with others. 

Apart from NEVER ODD OR EVEN; you are one of the seven creators of the work called Shared Landscapes, which we had the chance to experience at the Avignon Festival this summer. In your work, we have experienced simultaneously being personally aware of the landscape we are in and collectively sharing this awareness with those around us. So, yours was the only work in which we were consciously made aware of other spectators. How did this work of yours emerge?

Shared Landscapes is a big event in a forest that lasts an entire day and where the audience has the opportunity to experience seven different artistic proposals that try to reflect our relation with what we commonly call “nature”. It’s a fascinating project and we’ve done a participatory audio piece where we gently persuade the audience to engage in a series of actions that constantly change our relationship with the surroundings and the other people. It starts as an inner and intimate dialogue between us and each listener and then it becomes a collective ritual, which becomes a walk, which becomes a hunting scene and, finally, a collective composition of our bodies with trees, branches, stones and leaves. We tried to do a kind of a free flow between metaphysical, aesthetical, absurd and some totally banal questions inspired by the sensations and perceptions of the body in the landscape.

Going back to NEVER ODD OR EVEN; Is there anything particular you would like to tell the Istanbul audience before they experience your piece? 

 Just come watch the piece open minded and it would be great if you could stay some time after the show to talk with us or with other people about what you have experienced. Sometimes the most important thing is not so much the piece but what we could collectively share based on that common experience, using the piece as a pretext to talk and hear each other's worldviews and dreams.

[The Turkish version of this interview was published in unlimited on November 3rd, 2023.]